Blackbird Waiting
by Panuru
Summary: A prequel. The beginning of Reki's long, hard, stone-laden path. (Incomplete and static).
1. Chapter 1

Blackbird Waiting  
  
By Panuru (savannahlynnbyahoo.com)  
  
/  
  
"Blackbird singing in the dead of night  
  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly  
  
All your life  
  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise"  
  
– The Beatles  
  
/  
  
Winter came in a sharp knife slice, dividing warm and cold with its blade. Reki felt it sting her nostrils as if the molecules in the air had been sharpened into daggers of icicles. The window she used to leave partially open for its relief of cool air now let in a long claw of cold. The air slithered through with a whistle, rattling the small clay pots lining the window sill just above the bathtub. Reki watched them to see how long they could stand, her skin prickling with gooseflesh as her bath water stilled and sealed over her like tepid wax. Her feathers tickled the surface; when she lowered her head until the water closed over her nose and squinted her eyes she could see them waving like kelp, becoming clumpy and soft. She let the water close over her head, resting the back of her skull on the bottom of the tub so that the ceiling shuddered on the other side of the soapy screen of water, light dissected and scattered around her in buttery flecks.  
  
I wonder what the ocean is like, she thought, the idea bubbling from her mind like the oval of trapped breath she released to the surface of the water to watch it pop and ripple. She remembered the pictures in the library books of the ocean frozen in white mustaches of waves, the place where the water tapered off, in front of the endless stretch of blue. Reki wanted to lay in the ocean. When she'd told Kuramori of wanting to be lost in the water, the older Haibane had looked at her with a mixture of amusement and confusion.  
  
"You can't get lost, Reki," she had said, "because I'll always be by your side, holding your hand." And, as if to anchor Reki, Kuramori had swept up her hand and clenched it tight.  
  
Reki had felt comforted but smothered, like someone who had stepped into a new wonderful world only to be told it was dangerous as she was shepherded back into her old one.  
  
Old Home.  
  
If she closed her eyes, though, and refused the feel the cold porcelain of the tub, she could pretend that the water was not a tight cocoon, but an endless world, a watery mirror running a race with the sky. Reki lifted her hands out of the water in open palms, making little teardrop-wide rivers rush down her arms. Her wings opened as if waiting to catch a gust of wind to ride on. The thin bones shuddered, making the wet feathers quiver as she snapped them faster and faster, until they beat at the water like the propeller of a boat. Water spit fountain-like out of the tub as Reki lost herself to one reality in favor of another. The high ringing voice of something breaking snatched her mind back into the bathroom; she struggled to sit up, body teetering back and forth before she anchored both hands on the edges of the tub, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. One of the clay pots had been washed over the edge of the sill and had shattered on the edge of the tub, half scattered to the floor and half littered on the bathtub floor. Reki groaned as she lifted the pieces from the pool of bath-water, a single inky feather trickling into her palm in evidence of her guilt.   
  
/  
  
The garden soil had felt cool and velvety in her hands a few days ago, but now it was cold and bitter as Reki scratched a hole between two flowers. When the hole was deep enough for roots to anchor into the ground, she peeled open the top of the small paper pouch and turned it upside down over the crater in the soil, letting the seeds trickle to the bottom before raking the dirt back in, gently pushing it with her forefinger so that it sprinkled like black snow. Reki patted the little swollen place down into the ground before dusting her hands on the fronts of her thighs in little swats of triumph.  
  
"Reki? There you are. Aren't you cold?"  
  
Reki stood and smiled over her shoulder to Kuramori's approaching form, in hopeful redemption for making her worry. There was little she could do, Reki was finding, that didn't cause Kuramori's concern. Reki hoped that this would change once she had memorized the boundaries of her new life; for now, her world consisted of experimental actions, simple tests of Kuramori's reaction. If Kuramori allowed it, Reki continued to do it. There were far more things that Kuramori warned her against than approved of, however, and her face seemed to be in a constant tensed state of quivering facial muscles, like a coiled spring forced to always be prepared.  
  
"I planted a flower," Reki answered her, waiting for this response to cause Kuramori's face to collapse in a mild relaxation of relief. Instead, however, her lips drew into a fine pinched line.  
  
"Oh, no– it's not practical to plant flowers during the wintertime, I'm afraid," Kuramori told her ruefully, stooping down to the soil. "Plants don't usually survive the winter. It might freeze. Where did you plant it?"  
  
Reki frowned as she watched her search for a disturbed patch of soil. "Maybe this flower will survive the winter," she said hopefully. "I planted it to commemorate my birth as a Haibane, so that it can grow with me. Like a pet."  
  
Kuramori folded her forearms over her knees as she crouched, pausing to reconsider in light of this explanation.  
  
"Maybe, then, it'll be strong enough to fight the winter, right?" Reki pushed.  
  
Convinced, Kuramori stood and smiled, cradling Reki's shoulders under one arm as she led her back inside for supper. "I'm sure it will be a strong flower, like you. Just be sure to water and feed it, and give it extra attention, just as you would a child. Can you remember?"  
  
A grin of eagerness sliced Reki's face as she nodded up to Kuramori, who answered the expression with a smile warm with her confidence in the young Haibane. 


	2. Chapter 2

Reki watched the place in the garden, slightly discolored, like a bruise on the earth, from the window in the kitchen, not because she was obsessive, but because the stagnant state of winter had given her the obsessive habit. Old Home had become a small cage and Reki's mind had shriveled with it, forcing her thoughts to run in the same cramped circles.  
  
"What kind of flower did you plant?" Kuramori asked cheerfully as she polished the dishes in the sink that Reki hovered over.  
  
"Oh– Nn..."  
  
Kuramori laughed, setting another glass atop a stack with a jolly clinking sound. "It doesn't matter," she chirped, wafting away the matter with a little wave of the dish rag in her hand. "We'll see what it is when it blooms. This way it'll be more suspenseful."  
  
Reki's troubled expression loosened into a relieved smile before she turned her attention back to the garden with the new enthusiasm that Kuramori had planted in her with the remark.  
  
The flower had struggled from the earth in a little green bulb like two fat palms closed together in prayer, then had split into a curled M-shape. While the plant had been fighting to bloom, Reki had been given a job at Old Home and her name had been made official with the Communicator. She wished she could have remembered more of her cocoon dream in order to have a more romantic name. The other Haibane girls had names that meant "cloud", "starlight", and "rainfall"; all Reki had been able to recall was a cold, narrow path of stones. Kuramori had cheerfully baptized her "small stone." She'd thought it was cute, so Reki hadn't objected.  
  
"It's already reaching for the sky," Kuramori mused quietly as her gaze fell in line with Reki's toward the small green burst between two wilted tulip stalks.  
  
"It isn't afraid of winter," Reki said jovially, pushing from the edge of the sink and standing straight to watch the flower through the window. As she did, the somber form of Nemu passed through the kitchen. Reki looked swiftly over her shoulder in time to catch her retreating from the kitchen, her sad, sagging eyes heavy and half-closed in preparation for sleep. Under the droop of her eyelids, Reki recognized the look of wariness made in equal parts of resentment and fear. She sighed, resting an elbow on the edge of the sink and dropping her cheek in her hand.  
  
"What's with Nemu? She always looks nervous. I wish I could cheer her up."  
  
Kuramori's smile pinched a little with sadness as her movements changed, her hand slowly guiding a plate to the top of the stack as if it had gained sudden weight that made it harder to lift. "Nemu is... only worried," Kuramori said carefully.  
  
"Worried?" Reki repeated doubtfully. "About what?"  
  
"About you," Kuramori answered. Her voice began to sound pained, as if it took special effort to squeeze the words out of her throat, like the struggling muscles of a snake's belly.  
  
"Me?" Reki echoed again. "Why is she worried about me? I'm fine." To prove so, Reki stretched her arms out on either side of her with a soft grunt and fluttered her wings in a low shuffling sound of feathers rustling. The sound always reminded Reki of flying; it was like a promise she could never fulfill.  
  
Kuramori sighed slowly, setting down the washrag, peeling off her lemon-yellow gloves, and rubbing the lenses of her glasses on her shirt front. Reki, frowning at the slow, deliberate series of motions that suggested seriousness, somberly straddled one of the kitchen chairs to sit in it backwards, folding her forearms over its back and resting her chin on them in a gesture of attentiveness.  
  
"You see...," Kuramori began, "when a Haibane is born with black splotches on their feathers, it means they are Sin-Bound. Sin-Bound Haibanes... are different from other Haibanes." Kuramori's face crinkled with a grimace, as if she'd been stung by a bee, and she folded her hands in front of her.  
  
"Sin-Bound? What sin? I just got here– I haven't done anything that wrong, have I?"  
  
"Oh, no, no, Reki," Kuramori said hurriedly, wafting her hands a little as if to erase the idea from an invisible chalkboard. "No, you haven't done anything wrong, but... perhaps, in another life, in another time, you..." She took a steadying breath as her voice quivered and began again. "None of us know why some Haibane are good and others are Sin-Bound. It's just an unfortunate occurrence."  
  
"So my feathers are black. Big deal," Reki said optimistically, pushing her chair back and rising from the table. "I sort of like being different, anyway. Don't you think they're pretty?" Reki laughed, turning around and fanning her wings at Kuramori.  
  
The older Haibane smile wrinkled up tighter in a failed attempt at cheerfulness. "You are right, Reki...," Kuramori agreed helplessly, nodding. "You are beautiful."  
  
Reki laughed and ran a pear under the hiss of the sink faucet after plucking it from the kitchen counter, then left the kitchen and the conversation, not weighed down by the meaning of Kuramori's words.  
  
/  
  
The winter put all of the Haibane girls in Old Home in somber, reflective moods. Those who weren't staring in reverie out snow-lined windows were bravely socializing in a butterfly-like route of lighting from one Haibane to the next. Reki wanted to be a butterfly, but the others tended to huddle in tight rings to shield off Reki's entry from any angle. She assumed, innocently enough, that it was just because she was new, and even felt a little guilty for dropping an inky splotch on the pure white of their community. While pretending to be doing something else, writing or doing puzzles or reading books from the library, she'd listen to the parts of their conversations loud enough to escape the bubble of their bodies they would form around it.  
  
"I wish I could be like a snowflake– or a feather!– drifting through life, taking everything lightly,"said Odori, her expression tilted wistfully somewhere between the ceiling and the center of her circle of friends. Her cocoon dream had been of dancing along a carpet of autumn leaves; her name meant "dance."  
  
"You already do," said Kumo dryly. Kumo's cocoon dream had been of clouds, but she often said that Odori ought to take that name, since that was where her head usually was.  
  
"I think it's important-," Reki started, and felt the words pinched off in her throat when the other Haibane collectively turned their heads to her, half of their expressions resentful and the other half afraid, "I think it's important... to be grounded, but also to have dreams."  
  
The Haibane exchanged a flurry of birdish, uncertain looks, as if hurriedly looking among each other for something. When enough silence had followed Reki's statement, enough to let her know it would go unacknowledged, they went safely back to their conversation– a few of them even laughed belatedly at Kumo's statement, as if their lives had been paused for a brief moment to resume immediately where they had been left off. 


	3. Chapter 3

Author's Note: I pieced together the meaning of Kuramori's name what I could. "Amori," in general, means "protection," and "akurei" means "evil spirit." I liked the combination of those two ideas to form her cocoon dream, and took liberties in combining "akurei" and "amori" to make "kuramori." 

/

Reki began to accept her position at Old Home as its outcast from sheer exhaustion from trying to fight this fact. This pained Kuramori more than it did Reki, however. Reki had one of those imaginations active enough to repel boredom even without the company of others, and once she'd relieved her mind of the worry about the other Haibanes, she found much more enjoyable things with which to occupy it. After finding an old painting in the attic of the road to town, Reki was inspired to enthusiastically pursue art. The walls of her room became a time-line of her artistic process– a moving carousel of paintings. Kuramori was her only critic, and couldn't really be trusted with such a job. She would coo at every painting and claim it was the most beautiful she'd ever seen, but Reki eventually learned to discern real praise from the encouraging fluff that Kuramori felt obligated to provide.

"It's just...," Kuramori reluctantly started one day.

"Just what?" Reki asked eagerly, attentively waiting criticism.

"It's just, they're so dark and... _morbid_," Kuramori sighed, fingers grazing the canvas before her, tracing the dark clouded sky with the swollen red moon as its centerpiece.

"Oh...," came Reki's low voice, deeper with the weight of disappointment. "Well, it's supposed to be. That was sort of what it was like. I remembered it from my dream."

"Your dream?" Kuramori straightened with new interest. "The moon is from your cocoon dream? That's wonderful, Reki."

"Well, the shading was hard– I don't think it's that especially good-"

"No, I mean that you remembered more of your dream. Well, it's a little late to change your name to 'red moon,' isn't it? I like 'Reki' more than 'Getsu,' anyway..."

"I wonder what the cocoon dreams mean..."

"Perhaps they're indications of a Haibane's personality, or maybe they're something like premonitions."

"They could be just dreams, like regular ones. The workings of an idle brain."

Kuramori smiled to soften her objection as she shook her head. "I like to think that they mean something very powerful. In my dream, I was being protected from an evil spirit. It instilled in me a feeling that something is always watching over me, protecting me."

"I suppose I would feel more strongly about the cocoon dreams and what they meant if I could remember mine."

"I'm sure you will!" Kuramori said hopefully. "Look, you've already remembered more of it. Do you think the painting is helping you?"

"I think it is. It gives me a place to dump my imagination, so that I can sort of turn it upside down like a drawer and look for pieces of my dream..."

"Well, once I read that people keep everything they've ever seen, heard, dreamed or felt in their minds– it's just a matter of pulling the right trick or turning the right corner to remember."

Reki looked doubtfully at the painting. Sometimes she thought she'd rather not remember her dream. All the Haibane seemed to have close, affectionate memories of their cocoon dreams, like memories of being in a mother's womb, but when Reki recalled what she could remember, it was not with pleasantness. She didn't tell Kuramori this, however, and it made her feel a little better to know she was carrying some of the weight of her general wretchedness herself.

"Maybe you're right," Reki tagged the words absently to her tongue.

/

Reki blinked against the corridor light, her eyelids trying to bat it away like the defensive wings of a cornered bird. She'd finished a new painting that had caused a bloom of pride in her that immediately demanded to be shared with someone else– she was looking for Kuramori. When she laid her open palm against Kuramori's door, however, the soft murmur of other voices caused her to pause and bring her face close to the slit where it was open in a thin margin of light.

"It's ridiculous that you're treating her this way. She's a Haibane, like the rest of us, thrown into a strange new world like the rest of us, and deserves our friendship the most for what she's going through. Odori, what if when you had been born, we had turned our backs on you?" Kuramori was saying to them, her voice unusually firm. 

"It would have made me sad...," Odori admitted shamefully.

"There's a difference!" Kumo hissed sharply. "She's bad luck. We don't know why she's Sin-Bound. We shouldn't trust her."

"It could just as easily have been you, Kumo," Kuramori answered.

"I heard," Tobu interrupted, "that a Sin-Bound Haibane from Abandoned Factory kidnapped someone and drove knives through them to pin them to the wall."

"That's just an old horror story the Abandoned Factory Haibane tell," Kumo dismissed impatiently. "But it's based on the fact that Sin-Bound are untrustworthy. We have enough trouble here without someone like that. I say we hand her over to Abandoned Factory."

"We will not!" Kuramori said, stepping between the door and Kumo so that Reki could only see her back. "I'd rather send _you_! You have a bad attitude, and a cold, unforgiving heart."

Reki retreated from the door, pinning down the central joints of her middle fingers with her thumbs in two fists at her side. Discord among the Haibanes seemed so strange that Reki's guilt would not allow her to remember that it was actually a common occurrence among people. She needed suddenly to see the children, to insert herself stubbornly into her job and to distract herself from the others. Kuramori had always been with her when she took them outside, and when she opened the door and stood before them, they looked up expectantly at her, not trusting her lone authority.

"Who wants to play in the snow?" she asked, hoping to sound jolly and to excite them, but finding her voice teetering, like someone shuffling across an unreliable wooden bridge.

"Where's Kuramori?" one of the little boys asked.

"She's busy; I'm taking you out. It's my job to do it, the job I was given. You can go out with me. I'm a Haibane like the rest of them," she said briskly, expecting the words to sweep them out the door with their sharp authority. But the children recognized panic in her tone, and it further assured them that Reki wasn't suited to look after them.

The boy, who had assumed a position as their embassador, went back to the puzzle he was doing with another boy. "We'll go when Kuramori comes," he said with finality. His dismissive tone caused Reki's fists to tighten as she stepped into the middle of the room.

"No! You'll come with me. I said so, and it's my job!"

Now all the children looked up at her, round faces upturned in bubbles of fear and scorn that caused a sheet of warm anger to cling to Reki's skin.

"You're a Black Feather!" one of the boys shouted, throwing a crumpled piece of paper at her. This excited all their retained disrespect for her and gave them permission to exercise it. Laughter bubbled in a cruel boil and they danced around her in a smothering ring. Reki felt the fine, needle sting of her feathers being tugged.

"Black feather, black feather! It looks like _mold_!" one of the little girls squealed, and tucked her small hands fearfully to her chest after touching Reki's wings.

"Ew, you touched it, now you're gonna get moldy wings too!" one of the boys laughed.

"Mold!" another one shouted, grabbing Reki's wingtips and yanking at them. Reki whirled on him, snapped an arm back, and released the back of her hand like a sling-shot pebble on his cheek. The cracking sound silenced the children into open-mouthed sucks of breath. The boy's face crumpled like wet paper before he cried, then ran from the room shouting for Kuramori.

/

"Why didn't you tell me that they all hated me!" Reki shouted at Kuramori.

Kuramori frowned, lowering her voice to suggest to Reki to do the same. "They don't hate you, Reki. They're only afraid of what they don't understand. It's natural for people to feel that way."

"I heard you all talking," Reki snapped back, pointing toward the corridor. "I heard them saying that they wanted to send me to Abandoned Factory." 

This surprised Kuramori into silence. Finally, she opened her mouth to hurriedly assure her, "You aren't going to Abandoned Factory."

Reki expelled a sharp breathy sound. "I might as well. Now I've given them a real reason to hate me, at least."

"I'll explain to them what happened. They all know it's easy to get frustrated with the children sometimes," Kuramori offered, beginning to feel small and useless under the weight of Reki's anger.

"Don't bother," Reki said bitterly, her voice so low and cold that, after she walked tensely, briskly from Kuramori's room with a swing of her black pigtails, Kuramori withered into a chair beside the window and smothered her tears in her hands.


End file.
